Hopping Robots May Explore Mars By Tracy Staedter, Discovery News
Dec. 30, 2005— The Red Planet could one day see swarms of tennis ball-sized robots bouncing into underground caves in search of life. The robots will get their power from miniature fuel cells and use artificial muscle technology to spring into action. Equipped with tiny sensors and cameras, the devices will operate autonomously to collect data and look for the residual signs of microbial life that may have retreated to the planet's subsurface as it grew colder and drier over eons. The Mars-bots are being developed by Penelope Boston, associate professor at New Mexico Tech, and professor Steven Dubowsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Having lots of locally redundant instruments which are small enough and numerous enough to cover a much larger area than a single rover is a very innovative approach," said Max Coleman, director of Center for Life Detection at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech. Coleman is not linked to Boston's work. Boston, who is director of the Cave and Karst Studies Program at the university, has spent a lot of time studying the microbial life inside earthbound caves and thinks that they could serve as a model for what life may have been like in caves on Mars. But to explore caves on Mars would require different machinery than the rovers recently deployed to the planet. Such vehicles would not be able to navigate the difficult terrain found inside caves, and losing them or damaging them would prove costly. The hopping robots, she said, are small enough that a thousand of them could be packed into the same payload size as the Mars Explorer Rover. Losing a few to the perilous conditions of spelunking wouldn't adversely impact the gathering of data. "You have so much redundancy in the mission, you can cope with these high-risk hazardous terrains," said Boston. The robots will have a hard shell made from an advanced material that may or may not be transparent, but will be able to withstand the extreme cold of Mars, the intense ultraviolet radiation that bombards it, and the thin atmosphere filled with charged particles. Some robots will be equipped with small cameras, while others may have sensors that measure such variables as air quality, temperature, humidity, or chemical or biological signatures. Still others may carry miniature computerized chips designed to perform small-scale laboratory tests on soil or other samples. Each robot will move and function according to a computer program modeled on the behavior of insects. Each robot will be aware of the others around it and work collectively to accomplish an end goal. For example, if a device containing a chemical sensor fails or becomes lost, another device with a chemical sensor will take over the job. Boston and Dubowsky plan to spend the next two years building and testing prototypes that could find their way to Mars, or even the moon, within the next 10 to 20 years.
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